newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS -- I finally gave up. Every year I tried to plant vegetables in my tired plots. Too lazy to add new soil or build some raised beds, I defined insanity by plunking down fistfuls of cash for hardy starts budding with the promise of abundance.

And every year the same thing happened. Nothing.

Sure, the plants grew a bit, what wouldn’t in this land of wet and warmth, the sun pulling all-nighters so even my dumb-start developmental offerings had a chance. No vegetables, though, nothing like what my produce-sharing neighbors got, prompting moans of too many zukes and an overabundance of roots.

This year was different. I decided deep in the stasis of winter, having secured us a regular spot in our favorite Community Supported Agriculture farm, that I would let the garden areas go wild, as an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see what would grow if I just left the dirt alone.

Actually, I started a couple of years ago with the smallest plot. Inhospitable and life sucking, each healthy start would settle into the dirt dense with roots and — just exist. The ground already belonged to a plant I didn’t recognize by its pointy new spears, reddish green and ropy when I tried to pull them out, holding on to the earth like a kitten clings to a sock, all claws and nothing to lose.

When I got pregnant with my son, I decided to save my maternal attentions for a more promising patch. So I let that squatter take over. And by the following year there was a leafy green bush there, vibrant with leaves carrying a trace of a five o’clock shadow and thorns, not quite the dew-claw daggers of a rose, but sharp still the same.

I figured Sitka roses, since they flourish in the empty lots along our street, but the following summer brought tight white blooms that fell off to reveal the unmistakable gems of a raspberry bush. Who knew what dormant treasures were waiting in the rest of my yard? Maybe ferns unfurling with a wave to the madness of spring, majestic irises or some other local celebrity.

What I got was mostly weeds, but some of my favorite plants bear that name. At my friend Lynne’s house, I admired a succulent stalk with stunning leaves. She told me it was called jewelweed, easy to transfer and easily reaching heights in excess of five feet. That’s the plant for me, I thought. She promised to give me some starts.

Later that day at an event sponsored by the Friends of Creamer’s Field, she found a brochure about invasive non-indigenous plants; a most wanted list featuring the star of her own yard in its centerfold.

I’ve admired many of those same plants, counting them among the welcome intruders in my backyard wilderness. The alluring butter and eggs, with its towering stalks and snapdragon-shaped flowers; the aromatic bird vetch sprouting in billowing clouds of cobalt blue; and the stately Siberian pea shrub, recommended as a good privacy shield by the utility workers who came to trim back our unwieldy trees.

Weed is a label that’s thrown around like dandelion spores, so it’s hard to know when we should be cautious. Fireweed, considered invasive in Europe, is one of my favorite plants. Watching it sprout in meadows along the Kenai Peninsula helped me decide to stay. If this is what Alaska calls a weed, I thought, I must be in the right place.

I know scientists have the best interest of the ecosystem in mind when they release these lists of noxious plants, but I can’t help wonder whether somebody might just banish me from the Garden of Eden I’ve made for myself.

Like the Freeze Frame cartoon by Fairbanks artist Jamie Smith featuring a white professor, who says, spit flying and zeal emanating, “We must act now to eradicate any non-indigenous invasive species! Once established, there’s no telling what havoc they will wreak upon the natural order!!” I’m with the Native man in the audience who says simply, “OK. Get out.”

Some of the invasive species on the list are actually useful. There’s pineappleweed with a sweet scent released by a pinch of its velvet flowers, aromatherapy for my sun-stroked soul. Chickweed, which is good in salads. Even lambs quarters, with an iron and protein content higher than spinach, which is much harder to grow in my garden. Maybe that’s one way to stop the spread. Harvest edible weeds before they go to seed and toss them into the dinner.

Most of these weeds are here because of us anyway. Newly disturbed land encourages growth for the first act that comes to town. They sprout up along new trails and hitchhike into national parks on our wheels.

I’m fascinated by the way destruction benefits the ecosystem. The way wildfire helps spread some of these plants like a gardener tilling the land. My husband is a firefighter and he’s the wildfire in our garden, cutting down trees and tearing up the raspberry bush in the spring when it’s time to remove the snow.

I think of him as a destructive force, an interloper messing with my wilderness. And then I’m awed by the rejuvenating power of his actions when the raspberries come back twice as thick and abundant as before.